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THE COURSE I would most like to teach in a school of library science is one very dear to my heart. I would call it ‘Odds and Ends’, but since odds are that no library school would touch it with a ten‐foot pole, as we used to say back in Missouri, that ends ‘Odds and Ends’, as far as aspiring library students are concerned.

DRAGONS represent times far away and marvellous, where none of the ordinary work‐a‐day worries can torment mankind. In Dragon‐Land there are turreted castles, feasts of nightingale tongues, and pomegranates served in golden bowls. Here all men are the bravest of knights, victorious in battle and love, and all women are beautiful and gentle, and wait for lovers in hidden gardens of roses and lime trees, the while they weave tapestries of unicorns and wyverns.

ALL THE WHILE that the Carnegie Free Public Library brought culture and information and just plain entertainment to the residents of my home town, The Other Library there also provided the inhabitants with information and entertainment. This latter institution was far more powerful, all‐knowing, and, if the truth be told, more popular with its patrons, for all its sometimes shoddiness, than ‘Mister Carnegie's Lib'ary’. It never shut down, not even on holidays or Sundays, and its operations were as busy before 9 a.m. and after 9 p.m. as the Public Library was during that twelve‐hour stretch of community service. It had no librarian to keep it in order and cost no money at all to maintain, nor did folk have to mind their p's and q's to reap its benefits. The Other Library was Smalltown Gossip.

ANDREW CARNEGIE would have liked my mother, who for many years presided over one of his public libraries, but I am not sure he would have cottoned to me. Mother, after all, had many of the traits of his mother, whom he adored, and she also shared some of his own qualities. The only things Mr Carnegie and I would have had in common were strong‐minded mothers—Margaret Carnegie was said to be the one person whose will was never bent in surrender to her son—and the fact that we both at one time took elocution lessons. Also, each of us had our earlier literary work published in Sunday School papers.

THERE IS SIGNIFICANCE, perhaps, in the fact that in 1876, the year the first library in Moberly, Missouri, probably disappeared, a Wizard came to town. Professor Macallister, the Prince of Magic Performers, gave ‘great entertainments’ for three days, April 3rd, 4th and 5th, at Morgan's Opera House. ‘Without a peer in his line of business’, and ‘a gentleman whom it is a pleasure to know’, wrote the editor of the Moberly Enterprise‐Monitor (the first daily published in Moberly, its first issue dated 3 April 1873). ‘Do not be misled by classing the great East Indian magician with inferior traveling concerns, styling themselves Fakirs, etc. They not only injure reputations of first class magicians, but they give their patrons snide jewelry and sham watches for presents.’ Not so Professor Mac‐allister, who, in addition to his first‐class performance, distributed one hundred costly and valuable presents each evening: china tea sets, chamber sets, tête‐à‐têtes, chairs, marble‐topped tables, bureaus, American watches. Wisely, too, these articles were not brought out of the Wizard's hat but were purchased by his canny manager, Mr Harry Weston, from the business houses in the town. Any resident—or visiting drummer—for 25 cents (50 cents reserved seat) could see a true Wizard perform and also have a chance of winning atête‐à‐tête or a chamber set.

This paper was read at the Library Association Conference, Resource Centres in Schools, at Loughborough University of Technology in October 1971. It describes some of the more sophisticated American Resource Centres and deals with a situation a step or two away from general practice in this country. The author reports what he saw and how the centres are used, and so perhaps suggests both where and where not to aim in developing Resource Centres here.

CRUS (the Centre for Research on User Studies) started operations on 5 January 1976 as an independent research institute attached to the University of Sheffield and funded for its first five years by a grant from the British Library. From a purely utilitarian and financial aspect any library and information centre has to justify its existence from a cost‐benefit point of view, and therefore has to be responsive to the information needs of the community it serves. Thus the ‘determination of users' needs is absolutely essential to the management of an information center …. [It] exists only to provide service to user groups, and its monetary value is in terms of the service to the group[s] that it helps’.

IT WAS ONLY A SHORT TIME AGO, when an interview with the local press brought out the fact that the joint bibliothécariat of my predecessor and myself spanned a period of almost eighty years, that I began to feel really old, and to look back to the time of my entry into the library profession as a part‐time assistant, while I was still at school.

SIR JOHN SQUIRE once said, ‘The man who attempts to survey the writings of Belloc will think he is undertaking the literary history of a small nation’. And, with that wise comment in mind, these few remarks in commemoration of Hilaire Belloc's birth centenary will be mainly focused on the man himself, as far as that is possible.

If the bibliographic apparatus is the measure of a discipline's maturity, anthropology has come of age. Anthropology now has at least one entry in nearly all of the standard library reference formats — abstracts, annuals, atlases, dictionary‐encyclopedia, directories (to serials, biographical information, and academic departments), guides to the field, handbooks, indexes, library catalogs, and literature reviews. Some titles do not pigeon‐hole neatly into these categories, and some are beginning efforts, but it is important to know that they do at least exist.